Morgoth's Review offers a Non Politically Correct spin on news, politics and popular culture. If you are easily offended or of a Liberal persuasion this is not the place for you.

Saturday, 21 October 2017

Responding To Spiked Online's Attack On Richard Spencer

I've been reading Brendan O'Neill's ''Spiked Online'' regularly for a few months now, for those not acquainted with Spiked it's a sort of left-libertarian super-blog which, like their ideological bedfellows on YouTube ''The Skeptics'', has a somewhat contrarian view on current events. The SJW's, the feminists, the Muslims (if they're feeling brave) and identity politics receive their condemnation on a daily basis. I've enjoyed some of O'Neill's articles on Muslim terror attacks in Britain and Spiked has carried some interesting analysis of the surge in ''Right Wing populism''. And so I was left feeling deeply disappointed and underwhelmed by Spiked deputy editor Tom Slater's piece on Richard Spencer and the Alt-Right called ''Why is Richard Spencer a thing?'' which reads as if it was peeled off an obscure Anti-Fa blog:

'Flattering.' That’s what white identitarian sadsack Richard Spencer had to say about Florida governor Rick Scott’s decision to declare a state of emergency ahead of Spencer’s talk at the University of Florida yesterday. The move, which basically just allowed for more cops to flood the streets, left the alt-right leader feeling smug. He was on a par with ‘hurricanes and invading armies and zombie apocalypses’, he smirked.

.....The scene was insane. Police were wearing riot gear, and running airport-style security, which was so tight a veteran wasn’t allowed entry because they feared his cane might be used as a weapon.

That's what dangerous ideas do, Tom, that's how the system reacts to every threat, brute force and power. Richard Spencer receives the Hannibal Lector treatment not because he and a couple of dozen guys are a physical threat but because of what they have to say about the system. Given that Spiked Online's primary focus is defending Free Speech you should understand the awesome power of ideas, but you don't, do you?

Watching the clips of Spencer’s speech, you’re reminded how manifestly unthreatening he is. Yes, there’s his ugly, racialist rhetoric – he believes the US should become a white ‘ethno state’. But it comes across as batty rather than scary.

But as you just conceded above, Tom, the colossal amount of manpower and hardware the system deployed to contain Spencer is testament that the system is indeed scared, they're mortified by white people asking ''Why can't we have our own nation?'' because they have a vested interest in maintaining the U.S as a political/economic behemoth which homogenizes the planet while stuffing it with Miley Cyrus, porn and diversity inclusive Superhero movies.

But that’s what we’ve been hearing for months. Not too long ago Spencer’s primary propaganda tool was memes; now he gets wall-to-wall media coverage everywhere he goes. And yet the idea that alt-righters are about to storm the palace and bring about their longed-for white America is a fantasy. And the obsession with them, the constant media promotion, has in a sense willed the alt-right threat into being – it has made it more real than it was.

You're in the media too, Tom, and it's obvious because you're reporting on Spencer and the Alt-Right as the media always does, it isn't ''promotion'' it's lies and denigration, it's needless insults and ''white supremacy'' and ''Nazis'' and ''Date-less losers'' and ''KKK''. You're not giving us an original insight here, Tom, you're giving us a Guardian op-ed in the media while claiming that the media are spending too much time reporting on the Alt-Right. You aren't separate from it Tom, you are it.

Trump’s refusal to disavow his alt-right supporters – largely, it seems, because he’s incapable of criticising anyone who likes him – has no doubt emboldened them. But the idea that Trumpism is like some sort of Nazi Trojan Horse is utterly unsustainable, and projects a dim view of Trump voters: white supremacy, ethno-nationalism and throwback Nazism are as ugly and alien to the vast majority of those in the Rust Belt as they are to those on the coasts.

But if the working class white Americans of the Rust Belt demanded that whites remain majorities in the areas where they still are today you'd call them ''White Supremacists'' and ''Nazi Throwbacks'' too because you have more in common with the liberals on the coasts than with them. Trump understands the ghastly double standard and he also understands that he has to try and hold the creaking edifice together . The Alt-Right are simply putting forward the idea that the game is rigged against whites, like Daenerys Targaryen they do not want to carry on spinning the wheel as the white demographic drops off a cliff, they aim to break the wheel!.

But it does nothing to downplay that tragedy to say that these new movements, this more visible white-supremacist activity, aren’t really a threat. In the age of social-media organisation it makes perfect sense that the ragbag of old Klansmen, Nazis and these new geeky alt-right upstarts can better get their act together. What doesn’t make sense is the desire to present them as anything other than what they really are: vile, marginal losers.

But to reiterate what I said above, nobody represents White Nationalists as anything but ''vile marginal losers'' Tom, and you're doing it again here. If you had any integrity, any balls, you'd be using the free speech you regard with such reverence to ask why that is. Why is an entire racial group of humanity resolutely denied the right to live in their own lands alone? why is a people who want nothing more than to be left in peace constantly pilloried and trashed?

Just as Spencer should be free to spout his racialist drivel, so people should be free to protest against him, too. When you come across views that disgusting, it’s hard not to. But you can’t help but wonder whether leaving these alt-right loons to it, to Sieg Heil at each other in draughty, half-empty conference halls, to stop handing them a notoriety they don’t deserve, might be a more fitting response.

They can't be left alone, Tom, because what they have to say resonates with the wider European population once the mental blocks you used in this article are removed. Tech giants remove web domains, payment services block people for their political beliefs, militarized police swamp a dozen guys giving speeches, legions of state backed lackeys riot, governments scribble insanely draconian ''Hate Laws'' and for what? to deny European people the right to ask ''Why can't we have our own nations?''.

As I noted at the beginning of this post I read Spiked online because they, like me, are interested in current events, however, all of the issues Spiked covers, such as Free Speech, Populism, the Islam issue, feminism etc, are but the small rocks and ice particles which surround the meteor of European demographic collapse and replacement, against their will. A point Richard Spencer makes frequently, as do others prominent in the Alt-Right is essentially ''We're not an abstract value system, we're a people!''. Tom could have critiqued that, explored it, put it to the test, but he didn't dare. And yet he wonders why the system is so terrified of such ideas gaining traction. Spiked Online is primarily concerned with Free Speech, the reasoning is that all intelligent debate and understanding will flow from the right of everyone to be heard. And that's fair enough, but Spiked itself is not willing to actually use their free speech for anything more than telling us how great free speech is. Tom could have used his article to explain why white people are ''vile'' for wanting their own Nations, but he didn't, he could have written an article exploring the morality of white dispossession, but he didn't do that either, he reinforced it. So what real value is Spiked Online's free speech worship if it results in not much more than a Huff-Po style puff piece on evil ''White Supremacists''?.Not much, free speech without powerful ideas is like having a musket full of gunpowder but no shot, useless.